Polyols are generally produced from petroleum. Polyols are used in many fields of application, such as textiles, plastics, chemistry, the manufacturing industry or the cosmetics industry. Polyols are in particular used in the preparation of coatings, of adhesives, of elastomers, of resins or of foams.
Polyols are generally prepared via an alkene hydroformylation reaction. However, most of the processes described in the prior art regarding this type of approach use ligands that are difficult to handle in the open air, such as trialkylphosphines or phosphites which degrade in water. A simpler alternative consists in using amines as ligands. The use of tertiary amines has been described in the literature for converting terminal alkenes to alcohols by means of a reductive hydroformylation reaction (Morales Torres et al., Catal. Sci. Technol., 2015, 5, 34-54). Various systematic studies have shown the influence of amine, in terms of structure, of basicity and of amount, on the hydroformylation reaction with rhodium (Hunter et al., Appl. Catal., 1985, 19, 275-285). The most recent use of this type of catalytic system dates back to 2012 by Alper et al., (Adv. Synth. Catal., 2012, 354, 2019-2022) on the synthesis of terminal alcohols from styrene in the presence of tertiary diamines as ligand. The production of alcohol by this process using rhodium-amine catalytic systems has also been described in EP 0014225 and U.S. Pat. No. 4,197,414, but only starting from light olefins of 1-hexene type.
For heavier olefins, polyols are preferentially synthesized by an epoxidation reaction as described by WO 2006/012344.